Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/442

 issue. His father became regent until the boy should attain his majority. The regent was a fierce and relentless despot, who began his career by a sanguinary persecution of Roman Catholics. The boy lived in the midst of unspeakable atrocities, and was brought up to believe that the knife, the poison and the torture are the main implements of government. His father married him to a member of the Min family, and when the time came for the young King to assume the duties of his office, he found himself torn between. filial duty toward his imperious father and the softer but no less effective pressure brought to bear on him by the Queen. She and the regent were deadly enemies. Each of them had a will far more unbending than that of the King, and from the year 1872 there was war to the knife between these two individuals, which ended only with the assassination of the Queen in 1895 by the Japanese.

We must remember that in Korea, as in China, the chief ruler is limited in his actual power by the fact that those immediately about him can command all avenues of information and can colour that information to suit their own purposes. The war between the Queen and the regent opened when the latter sent an infernal machine to the father of the Queen, which resulted in the destruction of almost the entire family. If we try to imagine the state of mind of a ruler shut off from full access to genuine information and surrounded with such instruments of death, with murder in the hearts of those most intimately connected with his own life, we shall be able to picture to ourselves the disabilities under which the young King grew up. In 1882 the regent again tried to take the life of the Queen. The soldiers swarmed into the palace, tore in pieces, before the eyes of the King, some of the leading members of the Queen's faction, and missed killing the Queen herself only through a lucky accident. All this time the King himself knew not at what instant the knife might be put to his own throat. Two years later a band of fanatical men determined to force the government to follow the example of Japan. They seized the